Viet Thanh Nguyen: The Refugees

Thursday, we’re talking about the lives of refugees with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen. Nguyen came to this country when he was four, and he says there’s a tendency to separate the stories of immigrants from the stories of war. The people who seek refuge here though, he says, often have war stories to tell. Nguyen is in Utah, and joins us to explain what it’s like to be an outsider.

Thursday, March 9 at Noon, Viet Thanh Nguyen will lead a discussion on The Sympathizer. It's part of the city-wide Hivemind Book Club and will be in the 4th floor conference room of the Salt Lake City Public Library. [More Information]

Thursday, March 9 at 7:00 p.m., Nguyen will give a reading from The Refugees. That's also at the Salt Lake City Public Library - this in the Main Library Auditorium. [More Information]

Read Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1967 speech Beyond Vietnam. It connects racism to the war, and Nguyen says very few Americans confront themselves with it.

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Friday, we're rebroadcasting our conversation with novelist Cristina Henríquez, whose latest book centers around Latino immigrant families living in the US. Her work isn’t an argument for or against our immigration system, which Henríquez says everyone knows is broken. Instead, it’s the story of the ordinary lives that get lost in the news headlines of border patrols and political battles. With her book, Henríquez set out to give voice to people she says are often denied a chance to speak. It’s called The Book of Unknown Americans. [Rebroadcast]